Autumn Street by Lois Lowry

unfocused and trusting as the baby's, looking back at her.
    There was a covered enamel pail, tall and white, in Grandfather's bedroom, and I could not bring myself, even when he was on the porch in his wheelchair and the room was empty, to look inside the pail. I knew there were diapers there.
    So it was not death to be feared as much as this other. The going backward. No one spoke of it. And I thought again of my cousin David, whom I remembered still as tanned and playful in summer, laughing as he chased me to torture me with tickles. After two
years of war, David was still in the hospital. No one had spoken of him, either, for a long time.
    Finally I asked, "Did David have a stroke, too?"
    Mama looked at me, puzzled. "David? Do you remember David?"
    As if I could have forgotten that green, sweet summer when I was three. "He used to tickle me and call me Dizzy Lizzie," I reminded her. "Did he have a stroke, like Grandfather?" I didn't remember David's face, any more than I remembered Daddy's; but I could remember the hugs and the sunlight that summer. If, in his hospital, David was diapered now, and someone was wiping spit from his chin, I wanted to know.
    But Mama said no. "David was shell-shocked," she said.
    I didn't let her see that the words terrified me more than the word
stroke.
In Great-aunt Caroline's bedroom there was a pink translucent shell on a dresser; once she had held it to my ear and told me that I could hear the ocean.
    "Can I hear the Pacific?" I had asked, turning my head against the curved surface to find the sound.
    "Yes," Great-aunt Caroline had said. "The sound of the waves."
    I wasn't sure, because I had never heard waves. I
heard a hollow pink sound like the sound of far away, like the sound of dreams.
    Now David was there, shocked, in the hollow void, and it was worse than Grandfather, whose cane stood unused in the hallway closet, and whose mouth formed no words but opened wetly again and again. David's fate had to do with the war; and the shell made it the war in the Pacific, so I had new fears for Daddy. Everyone I loved was threatened by things I didn't understand. Everyone but Tatie. I wandered down the stairs and into the kitchen; Tatie was there, as she always was, and she was making a pie. Apple pie was so familiar, so comforting, that I forgot the sickroom upstairs, forgot David, the shell, the Pacific, and Daddy, settled myself on a kitchen chair and popped a fingerful of raw dough into my mouth.
    "Grandmother says that if you eat raw dough your insides will stick together. Do you believe that, Tatie?"
    "Nope. I been eating it myself since I was as big as you."
    "How are your insides?"
    "Too
fat
is how they are. And yours is too skinny."
    "Grandmother says that if I want to grow properly I should take cod-liver oil and learn the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church."
    "Ha."
    "That's what I say. Ha."
    "Lick your finger, Liz, and hold it out."
    I did, dutifully, and Tatie sprinkled my fingertip with cinnamon. I sucked it while she sprinkled the sliced apples; it tasted like Fall, and made my nose itch.
    "Tatie, if I ask you something will you promise to say yes?"
    "Nope."
    "Please?"
    "Ask me."
    "Can I take the can of cinnamon, just for a few minutes?"
    "Where you want to take it to?"
    I kicked my dangling feet together, and finally told her. "Grandfather's in his wheelchair on the upstairs porch. I want to put cinnamon on his finger."
    "Your grandma's with him, and she won't like that."
    "If I ask her first, and she says yes, can I?"
    Tatie sighed and handed me the small tin can.
    But Grandmother was asleep, nodding in her wicker chair, a book open on her lap and her glasses pushed up on top of her gray hair. I tiptoed to where Grandfather sat staring in his wheelchair, a blanket across his legs despite the end-of-summer heat, his eyes alive but uncomprehending, his hands useless in his covered lap.
    "Lick your finger and hold it out," I whispered to him.
    His head bobbed but his